This is Liam Guilar's Blog, mostly about poetry, mine and other people's, and anything else of interest. Over the years it has unintentionally developed into an online poetry resource, check the names in the sidebar but Bunting, Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Tennyson and the medieval poets get fair coverage. Lady Godiva and Me was a sequence of poems that linked Lady Godiva, both the historical Godgifu and the legendary Lady G, to a character growing up in the city of Coventry after the second world war.
You can see a short film about the collection Here.
My most recent book of poems, Anhaga is published by Vanzenopress and avialable from my website. Further information, full length articles and sample poems are available on my website Here .

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Thursday, March 31, 2016

I will return to Joseph Campbell, and the
footnote poets.Chronic illness has a way of interrupting plans. However, one is excited.

(What follows was meant to be a short
expression of excitement, but it got out of hand. There were fascinating rabbit
holes which just appeared as I was writing it and since I’m not late for any
important dates, I gleefully accepted their invitation.So this ended up in three parts).

Part
one:

Once upon a time, a very long time ago now,
even further than last Friday, Faber began advertising a hardback edition of Basil
Bunting’s Complete Poems, edited by Don Share.

The current Amazon blurb reads:

This is the first critical
edition of the complete poems, and offers an accurate text with variants from
all printed sources. Don Share annotates Bunting's often complex and allusive
verse, with much illuminating quotation from his prose writings, interviews and
correspondence. He also examines Bunting's use of sources (including Persian
literature and classical mythology), and explores the Northumbrian roots of
Bunting's poetic vocabulary and use of dialect.

I preordered mine in April 2010, and at
regular intervals for the past five years I have been receiving updates from
Amazon, which politely tell me they are still waiting for the book to be
published.

But now, six years later, there is a
publication date of 16th of June and an estimated delivery date.

One is excited.

Why? That’s a good question. Well, there is
dearth of things Bunting so anything new is welcome.

The claim that this is the first ‘critical
edition’ is perhaps bending the definitions of the word ‘critical’.There’s a Complete
Poems, published by BloodAxe (1999) and edited by Richard Caddel. It
contains a section of ‘uncollected poems’.
It’s a paperback and mine is starting to fall apart. It was falling apart five
years ago so a hardback at least promises longevity.

There’s a chance that there remain some
poems that are not in Caddel’s edition. Richard Burton published at least one previously
unpublished piece in his recent biography, A
Strong Song Tows Us (2014). The complete Persian poems, as recently published
separately by Don Share, Bunting’s Persia
(2013), will hopefully be included. There’s always the possibility of
drafts, which could be enlightening to those of us interested in ‘how he did it’.

But there’s also the danger of dredging up pieces
that do the poet’s reputation no favors. I think there’s a good reason why Eliot turned
down some of the Persian translations. And Ode
11 in the First Book of Odes ‘Narciss, my numerous cancellations prefer’
expressed Bunting’s strong opinions on the subject, in response, To a Poet who advised me to preserve/my
fragments and false starts.